“Re-branding” Massachusetts Conservatism

After a horrible election cycle, where even a Republican candidate who received an endorsement from the Boston Globe and Berkshire Eagle Tribune (doesn’t get any farther left than this until you reach Pravda) we should have been given pause to think. Certainly the tax proposal on the ballot gave a superb platform for the progressives to organize state workers (SEIU) and that part of the urban community who is rich with people receiving government benefits. However, that explanation, while very true, is insufficient. We are getting beat because we have been “branded”, branded as un-caring…branded as rich…branded as greedy. The Mass Republican Party has been “branded” as the party of greed, unwilling to share the spoils of her labors.

In fact, conservatives are the ONLY HOPE for the self same populations that were organized against our candidates. Why aren’t WE branding the Democrats/Progressives as “the Party of Fixed Incomes”? Isn’t THAT the downside of government benefits? How many of us haven’t heard our retired parents or grandparents bemoan this? Yet the rhetoric of redistributed income, doled out in small allotments to “the needy”, making them only marginally less needy is hailed as kindness.

For the Republican Party to thrive (and for them to “recruit” me as a member), they need to re-brand themselves as the party of workers, the last best hope for the common working person. And, in the process, the progressives need to be branded as the party of marginalization.